9. The
focus on #MyDH needn’t diminish the
DH ethos of collaboration (i.e., #OurDH). #MyDH is a way of recognizing
differences. #dhsi2016

10. #MyDH doesn’t need six-figure grants.
We can do a lot with off-the-shelf tools, patience & a willingness to
learn/ screw up. #dhsi2016

I would
be more than happy to talk more with you about any or all of those Tweets in
the Q&A later. But in the time I have left, I’d like to just briefly expand
on Tweets 2 and 3, related to social justice. In the fall of 2015 my colleague
Ed Whitley and I co-taught our first-ever Introduction to Digital Humanities
course at Lehigh. One of the prominent units we lined up related to digital
archives; what I discovered was surprising and disconcerting. (Incidentally, I
wrote about this in detail in a blog post called “The Archive Gap: Race, the
Canon, and the Digital Humanities.”) The essential point is that there
is a huge gap between the archive frameworks that exist for canonical writers
and those that exist for minority writers and writers from the colonial world.

There’s
no doubt that this problem has been recognized and that there’s been a growing
effort to address the conservative and canonical legacy of some early digital
archive projects. But in my view, simply aiming to match archives of canonical
figures with works by writers from the emerging canon isn’t sufficient. Going
forward, I would be interested in seeing if we can design digital archives
differently. Established archives of canonical
figures tend to emphasize the neutral and idealized presentation of the
materials. Any references to politics, and any specific points of editorial
advocacy are carefully downplayed. What if we reconceived of our role as
archivists and editors? Perhaps our role in presenting materials should be as
much to advocate for the authors themselves – and along the way, offer actual
interpretations of their works – as it is to present their textual materials.

I’ve been
aiming to do some of these things with a new digital project I’ve been
developing in Scalar with a pair of graduate research assistants (the project
is presently at a very embryonic phase). We aren’t exactly hiding from the
canon – the project is called “The Kiplings and India.” But there are two ways
in which our thematic collection might be different from earlier projects. One
is that it emphasizes the extensive degree to which the famous Author, Rudyard
Kipling, collaborated with his other family members, including especially his
sister, Alice Kipling. (In my Tweet #5 I mentioned that women writers have been
written out of the Canon; here we could say the women Rudyard Kipling
collaborated with have been written out of the story of his emergence as a
writer, and I would like to write them back in.) Second, we are designing the journalism
component of the archive with an eye to social movements and conversations that
were happening all around British India (including the voices of actual Indian
people, especially Indian women), but
with which the Kiplings themselves may not have had extensive direct
engagement. The idea is that someone interested in issues related to, say,
Indian women and divorce law (a topic which was being hotly debated during by
both British and Indian participants in the 1880s) could gain access to useful
editorial insights and archival materials from our site without necessarily
having to see that interest mediated through the Kipling family.

To go
back to teaching. After we talked about the Archive Gap dynamic in the DH class
I was co-teaching last fall, I designed a collaborative class project assignment around a groundbreaking
1922 book of poems by Claude McKay, Harlem
Shadows (which includes the famous statement of rebellion, “If We Must Die…”).
Admittedly, there is already a pretty nice presentation of those poems in a
project by Chris Forster and Roopika Risam, but it’s very textually focused and
offers minimal editorial commentary. With my graduate students at Lehigh, I
encouraged them to think about a project that might appeal to a broad
constituency of readers, including undergraduates and high school students as
well as non-specialists.

The
students were given certain encouragements, but then we let them loose to make
their own design and editorial decisions. What they came up with was surprising
and deeply impressive. First, they retitled the project to differentiate it
from a standard digital edition. Second, they created two presentations of the
poems inHarlem Shadows,one version that corresponds to
thepoems
in the order in which they were originally printed,
and another version thatpresents
the poems thematically. All of the poems are
thematically tagged based on a set of tags
agreed upon collaboratively by students in the class. The site includes a
clickable Wordcloud of student-generated tags that leads users to lists of
poems oriented around specific tags. They also generated a substantial number
of contextual and biographical essays that help bring the poems inHarlem Shadowsto life for today’s readers. And
finally, students built the site themselves, including menus, graphics, and
text. I directed them to use a public domain, “dirty OCR” version ofHarlem Shadowsderived from the Internet Archive.
They proofread and corrected the OCR and produced unique pages for each poem inHarlem Shadows. (As a side
note, if we did the project today, we would do it in Scalar -- but I hadn’t
really gotten my head around Scalar last September.)

No comments:

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2018, is now available on Amazon.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All are in progress as of January 2019.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.

I also put together a digital edition of Jean Toomer's Cane, taking advantage of the fact that that work is now in the public domain. That project can be found here.